Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 28 of 36 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Gospels are Finally Named! Irenaeus of Lyons.

In the previous post we saw that the Gospels almost certainly circulated anonymously at first, just as they were composed anonymously. It is an interesting question why the authors all chose to remain anonymous instead of indicating who they were. I have a theory about that, and I may post on it eventually when I get through a bit more of this thread on why the Gospels ended up with the names they did. At this stage, what we can say with certainty is that the Gospels are quoted in the early and mid-second centuries by proto-orthodox Christian authors, who never identify them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is especially significant when we come to Justin around 150-60 CE, who explicitly quotes these books as “Memoirs of the Apostles,” but does not tell us which apostles they are to be associated with. This is in Rome, the capital of the Empire, and the seat of what was probably the largest, and certainly the most influential, church at the time. Some thirty years after [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:13-04:00November 18th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

When Did the Gospels Get Their Names?
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When Did the Gospels Get Their Names?

Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)

When Did the Gospels Get Their Names?

When Did the Gospels Get Their Names? In this series of posts on the authors’ names associated with the New Testament Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – we have so far seen that the texts themselves are completely anonymous. The authors of two of these works (Luke and John) do speak in the first person in a couple of instances, but they do not say who they are. By the end of the second century, roughly a century after the books were written, they were being called by the names that are familiar to us today. So naturally one might wonder, when were they given these ascriptions? When Did the Gospels Get Their Names: Evidence Contrary to what you may sometimes have heard, there is no concrete evidence that the Gospels received their familiar names early on. It is absolutely true to say that in the manuscripts of the Gospels, they have the titles we are accustomed to (The Gospel according to Matthew, etc.). But these manuscripts with titles do not start appearing until [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:13-04:00November 17th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Did the Beloved Disciple Write the Gospel of John?

I have started a series of posts dealing with the authorship of the Gospels – specifically, why they were eventually named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My first point, in my previous post and in this one, is that the books are completely anonymous. Their authors never divulge their names. Eventually I may want to address the question of why that is. But for now, my point is that despite what people might commonly think, the books are anonymous. I pointed out yesterday that even though the author of Luke does not tell us his name, he does write in the first person (“I”/ “we”) in the opening of his Gospel. That never happens in either Matthew or Mark, but it does happen again in the Gospel of John. In fact, it is widely claimed – sometimes even by scholars who should know better – that the author identifies himself as the “beloved disciple” who appears several times in the Gospel of John, and only in this Gospel. On a number of occasions the author [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:12-04:00November 14th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Our Anonymous Gospels, Starting with Luke

Over the past few weeks I’ve had several people ask me about why the Gospels of the New Testament are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s a great question, and one that I want to do some more intense thinking and reading about myself. So I thought I would lay out some of the basics here in a series of posts, and think aloud a bit about why I think the Gospels got the names they did. To begin with, it’s important to recognize that the Gospels themselves are completely anonymous. None of the authors identifies himself by name. The Gospels are all written in the third person about what “they” – other people – were doing (including, of course, and principally, Jesus). There are only a couple of exceptions to the third-person narratives of the Gospels, and even in these cases the authors do not given their own names. The first is in the Prologue to Luke’s Gospel, Luke 1:1-4, where the author says: Just as many have attempted to write a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:12-04:00November 14th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

New Boxes: Oral traditions and the Dates of the Gospels

For the sixth edition of my New Testament textbook I have written twelve new “boxes.” These are side-line discussions of interesting and relevant (if a bit tangential) issues of some importance for various aspects of the study of the New Testament. I will post several of these, including these two here. If these generate any questions, let me know, and I can follow up on them. The two are about the Gospels: the first has to do with the ongoing nature of oral traditions (which did not stop with the writing of the Gospels!) and the second with how scholars have determined the dates of the Gospels. ************************************************************** Box 5.2 Another Glimpse Into the Past The Church Father Papias and the Ongoing Oral Tradition Oral traditions about Jesus did not cease to circulate as soon as the Gospels were written. On the contrary, we have solid evidence that the traditions continued to thrive for a very long time indeed. Hard evidence comes in the writings of a second-century Christian named Papias, the author of a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:11-04:00October 27th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Jesus Sweating Blood: Transcriptional Probabilities

I’ve been discussing the kinds of evidence that textual critics appeal to in order to make a decision concerning what an author originally wrote, when there are two or more different forms of the text – that is, where a verse or passage is worded in different ways in different manuscripts. And I have been using the passage found (only) in (some manuscripts of) Luke of Jesus’ bloody sweat as an example. Yesterday I discussed one kind of “internal” evidence. Remember: external evidence deals with figuring out which manuscripts have which reading: how many manuscripts (not so important), age of the manuscripts, geographical distribution of the manuscripts, and (something I didn’t discuss) quality of the manuscripts. And recall that internal evidence is of two kinds, the first of which is “intrinsic probabilities,” which seeks to establish which form of the text is more likely to have been written by the author himself. The second kind of internal evidence is a kind of flip side of the coin, and it’s called “transcriptional probabilities.” With arguments/evidence of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 17th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Jesus’ Sweating Blood and “intrinsic” evidence

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision. There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intrinsic probabilities and (2) transcriptional probabilities. For now, I’ll focus on the first. Intrinsic probabilities involve determining which of two (or more) forms of the text found in the manuscripts is the one that the author himself was more likely to have written. Suppose you have a verse worded in two different ways. If one of the ways uses the vocabulary and the writing style found elsewhere in the author, and presents ideas that he otherwise attests, whereas the other way includes words and grammatical constructions and ideas that are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 16th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

The (Ancient) Genre of the Gospels

In this thread I’ve been talking about how I conceived of my New Testament textbook, some 20 years ago now, as a rigorously historical introduction. I’ve been stressing that one of the ways it is historical is that it takes seriously the Greco-Roman milieu out of which it arose, and that one of the key implications is that one needs to read the NT books in light of the ancient genres which they employ. My argument in the book (and in general!) is that if you misunderstand how the ancient genre works, you will misunderstand the book. The Gospels, I argue, are written as Greco-Roman biographies. Here is an excerpt where I describe what that means and why it matters, again from the first edition of my textbook. ********************************************************* We have numerous examples of Greco-Roman biographies, many of them written by some of the most famous authors of Roman antiquity, for instance, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus. One of the ways to understand how this genre "worked" is to contrast it with the way modern biographies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

Placing the New Testament in Its Own Historical Context

In my previous post I began to discuss how I chose, back in the mid 1990s, to conceptualize my New Testament textbook, not as a theological/interpretive introduction to the NT, or as a literary introduction, but as a rigorously historical introduction. Among other things, that meant treating the books of the New Testament as *some* of the early Christian wriitngs, which needed to be discussed in relation to other early Christian writings produced at about the same time. In this post I’ll talk about one other feature of a more historical approach to the New Testament. Almost all the other introductory textbooks available at the time, as I indicated yesterday, began with a kind of obligatory appendix on the “background” to the New Testament – information on the historical, political, social, and religious matrix out of which the New Testament sprang (first the Greco-Roman context and then Jewish). Once all *that* was over with, these textbooks typically moved to talk about the writings of the New Tesatment without incorporating any insights from the world in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

Clarification!

I need to clarify something that I said in my earlier post today about my next project, since I have elicited several demurrals in response, and it was because I didn't express myself very clearly. What I said was this: Scholars have long held that Mark was the first of our Gospels to be written, and that it probably appeared sometime around the year 70 CE. Some scholars think it might have been a bit before that (I used to think that); more scholars think that it might have been a bit after. But almost everyone agrees that Mark dates to around the end of the Jewish War (66-70 CE). The only ones who consistently have argued otherwise are fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals, who very much want Mark, our earliest Gospel, to be closer to the time of Jesus. When I said that the only scholars "who consistently" argued for an earlier date I didn't make myself clear. The reason I said "consistently" is because the only group of scholars that regularly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:08-04:00August 13th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Discrepancies That Pay Rich Dividends

This will be the last post in the hiatus I have been taking from responding to Craig Evans’s critique of my view of Jesus’ burial. I had thought this hiatus would be one, maybe two posts; but as often happens on this blog, once I get going on something I realize that I have to say more -- or else what little I have to say will not make much sense. So my couple of posts have turned into four, all on the question of whether the historical-critical approach that I take to the Gospels is “trashing them,” as a lot of people seem to think, or if, instead, it is a valuable tool for understanding what these books really are – literary attempts to teach important theological lessons about Jesus based on stories about his life – rather than what they are not – historically accurate, objective biographies of the things that Jesus said and did. In the last post I argued that the two portrayals of Jesus going to his death in Mark [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:48-04:00July 16th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

Why the Critical View of the Gospels Matters Theologically/Religiously

In my two previous posts I’ve been trying to explain that the historical-critical view of the Gospels, in which they are recognized not always to represent historically accurate information about Jesus, is not necessarily a view that “trashes” them. Instead, it is a view that tries to understand what they really are instead of insisting that they are something else. Accepting them for what they are is surely a good thing; making them into something they are not can’t be good. In this post I want to do something highly unusual for me. I want to explain, for those of your who are Christians (or for anyone else who is interested), why this critical view of the Gospels is in fact *theologically* valuable, far more theologically value than a view that would insist that the Gospels have no discrepancies between them or errors of any kind, but are historically accurate accounts of what happened in the life of Jesus. When I was a Christian, once I came to the conclusion that the Gospels in fact [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:48-04:00July 15th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

Ancient Forerunners of Modern Gospel Critics

In my previous post I argued that critical scholars who insist that the Gospels are not historically accurate accounts of what happened in the life of Jesus – even though they do contain some historically accurate information, which needs to be carefully and cautiously ferretted out of their narratives – are not trashing the Gospels. They are trashing unfounded fundamentalist assumptions about the Gospels. In this post I’d like to argue that this view -- that the Gospels are not sacrosanct-historically-accurate-to-the-very-detail accounts of what really happened in the life of Jesus -- is not merely a modern notion that emerged during the Enlightenment. It is that, to be sure; but it’s not merely that. In fact, I would argue that this is the earliest attested view of the Gospels from earliest Christianity. Let’s assume for this argument a view that most scholars hold and that I could demonstrate if I wanted to spend a lot of time doing so, that Mark was the first of our Gospels and that Matthew and Luke both had access [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:48-04:00July 14th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

Why Are You Trashing the Gospels?

I am going to take a break for three or four days from my response to Craig Evans’s critique of my view of Jesus’ burial. There are more things that I need to say – and I have not yet gotten to what I think are his two best arguments. But my sense is that some people are getting a little tired of a steady dose of posts on the burial stories, so… I’m going to break to deal with something else of more general interest. I have had several people respond to my argument that Jesus was not really buried by Joseph of Arimathea on the day of his crucifixion by asking me: Why are you trashing the Gospels? It’s a fair question, and deserves a fair answer. The short story is that I’m not intending or trying to trash the Gospels. In my view, what I’m doing is showing what the Gospels really are and what they really are not. And that is not a matter of trashing them. It’s a matter of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:48-04:00July 13th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

Why Textual Variants Matter for the Rest of Us

In this thread I am discussing why it matters that there are so many variants in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. It does not matter because there are any “fundamental Christian doctrines” at stake, per se, but for other reasons. As I sketched in my previous post, it should matter for anyone who believes that God gave the very words of the Bible, since the facts that we don’t *have* the original words in some cases and that in many other cases the words themselves are in doubt, should call that belief into question. (I should point out that with the Hebrew Bible we are in MUCH worse shape in knowing what anything like the “original” -- whatever that might be – was. The textual situation there is really quite dire.) The second group that the variants should interest would include just about anyone -- whether scholar, student, or general reader – who is interested in knowing what the various authors of the Bible had to say about this, that, or the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 21st, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Next Step: Redaction Criticism

In this breezy overview of New Testament scholarship that I’ve been giving, from roughly the 18th century till today (!) I have talked about textual criticism (establishing what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote based on the surviving manuscripts), source criticism (determining what the written sources of the New Testament were – especially the Gospels, and most especially the Synoptic Gospels), Life of Jesus research (up to Albert Schweitzer’s day), and finally form criticism (the interest in establishing the formal characteristics of the oral traditions of Jesus in circulation before the Gospels were written down). In some respects, form criticism put the final nail in the coffin of historical Jesus research, a coffin fashioned by Wrede and Schweitzer. If the stories about Jesus, even in our earliest Gospels, are not accounts of what happened but narratives that were formulated by communities of Christians after his death (as the form critics assumed), well, there’s not much source material left if we want to reconstruct the life of Jesus. And so a lot of scholars [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 26th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Form Critics and Oral Tradition

Once it came to be realized that Mark’s Gospel – the earliest of our surviving accounts of Jesus – was driven not purely by historical interests in order to record biographical information with historical accuracy, but was (like the other Gospels) written in order to convey theological ideas in literary guise, the movement to use Mark to write a “Life of Jesus” more or less collapsed on itself, for a time and among most New Testament scholars. What arose from the ashes of this “Quest of the Historical Jesus” could not have been foreseen by its devotees – as often happens in times of disciplinary progress and change. The big breakthrough came with the work of Karl Ludwig Schmidt (whose most important book was never translated into English, to my knowledge). Schmidt realized that the theologically loaded parts of Mark’s Gospel were not found in the core stories found throughout its account, but in the “framework” for these stories, that is, in the narrative transitions that the author himself provided for moving from one story [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 23rd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

More Background on Oral Traditions

Up until the 1920s, critical scholars who were deep into questions of New Testament studies had focused a lot of their attention (not all of it, obviously) on questions of textual criticism (how do we know what the “original” text was?) and source criticism (what are the written sources lying behind the New Testament – especially the Gospels?). The former was a matter of concern largely because it was thought that the words of Scripture were inspired by God – so it was important to know what those words were! The latter was a matter of concern in no small measure because of the intriguing questions themselves (was Mark the first Gospel? Did Matthew and Luke copy it? Did Q exist? and so on) but even more because of the significance of their answers for understanding the historical Jesus. If we want to get back to Jesus, and the later Gospels represent alterations of the traditions about him by later authors, then surely the best procedure is to determine our *earliest* sources. And if Mark [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 22nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

Background to the Interest in Oral Traditions

Just to give a bit of background to the work I’ve just started doing on the question of the oral traditions about Jesus in the years before the Gospels were written, some initial points: 1) I am not, decidedly NOT, the first scholar to think this might be of some interest! On the contrary, it has long been intriguing to scholars, and there are a number of important books that have appeared in recent years, for example, James Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (just last year!) and, even better known, Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (a fat and very important book.) I would make two points about these (and other similar) books: they are not written for general audiences but for scholars, and I fundamentally disagree with lots of their views and claims! My approach will be very different, as, no doubt, will be my conclusions and arguments. 2) I am just at the beginning stages of my work. My plan is to read as extensively as I can over the next three months [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 21st, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Disciples Have Visions of Jesus?

I am ready and willing to begin answering questions readers have about my book How Jesus Became God. So feel free to ask away. Here is a good one I received today. QUESTION: I have enjoyed reading your interesting and thought provoking books, Jesus Interrupted and Forged. At the moment I am reading How Jesus Became God and would like to comment on some of the content of Chapter 5. To that point in the book, it seems to me you have been very careful to avoid speculation, but it seems to me that the application of your usual standards may have lapsed somewhat in regard to the visions of Jesus after the crucifixion. Specifically, what evidence do we have, apart from the Gospels, that any of Jesus' disciples actually had visions of Jesus after his death? Certainly, at some point in early Christianity, the story of the visions became part of the lore, but as you have pointed out in previous parts of the book, the oral recounting of the stories was subject [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:59-04:00April 15th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

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